The new office of the workshop is located on the territory of the Rassvet plant (formerly the Myur and Meriliz factory), in Krasnaya Presnya, which is now being actively renovated and developed according to the concept of friends and colleagues of ATRIUM - the architectural group DNA ag. ATRIUM rented a large two-story space here in one of the old production halls of the 70s with six-meter ceilings and huge windows. The premises were completely reconstructed: they cleaned out, changed the floors and stained-glass windows, built in new ceilings and organized the mezzanine floor, everything was completely re-planned. The surplus area was adapted for sublease.
The authors sought to create the most open interior, filled with light and air. The built-in mezzanine allows you to perceive the space from above and creates additional visual angles. Its black frame, like a frame, contains geometric volumes of rooms, articulated with color and materials (cement decorative panels, cellular polycarbonate).
The original shell has been left unfinished: the ceilings are dust-free and the walls are painted, preserving traces of the site's history. Soviet-era artifacts discovered during the renovation have also been preserved - now they are exhibited in the entrance hall. And this is just one of the techniques through which architects develop loft aesthetics - as the most suitable for creative spaces and allows you to optimize the budget. The most striking accent is the self-leveling floors of the brand red ATRIUM color - a deliberate reference by the authors to the aesthetics of the Russian avant-garde.
However, the compositional and semantic dominant of the interior is the volume of the main meeting room. The sculptural form hanging from the ceiling, built on the principle of minimal surfaces, has become the hallmark of the entire project and embodies the latest trends in modern architecture. The shaping of this volume is based on articulated windows that create unexpected visual connections not only with the interior space of the office, but also with the street. The form adapts optimally to the surrounding situation and functionality and suddenly changes its shape when perceived from different points.
Anton Nadtochy: “We took the original parallelepiped and transformed it depending on the function and the existing situation. The negotiation had to be both isolated and have a certain degree of transparency and openness. We decided to make several openings-planes: one provides a visual connection with the entrance area, the second, at the floor level, looks at the territory, and a glass partition with an entrance door, as it were, meets you as you move along the corridor and invites you to enter. In these places, the form stretches and transforms, and responding to the TV screen inside the room, it seems to be pushed in the other direction. The result is a new sculptural form that is functional in nature and fits perfectly into the context."
Just as the entire interior is built on the principle of "minimum-optimal intervention" - to save energy and money, so the volume of the meeting room, despite its geometric complexity, is structurally and in execution very simple: the external walls are a metal frame sheathed with GKL on both sides with soundproof filling and covered with PVC fabric. As a result, the resulting shape resembles a hornet's nest, stuck to the outer wall, between the ceiling and the ceiling. So you can imagine how the employees flock there, buzzing. The similarity is, of course, figurative. Passing through a futuristic filter, the volume has optimal edges and surfaces, and was built by creatures who were definitely familiar with the geometry of the plane and the aesthetics of Suprematism.
In addition, the white planes, placed under the slanting light from the window, cannot but remind each Moscow Architectural Institute graduate of the faceted head that everyone drew. And the demonstration of the ATRIUM method is precisely in this “many-sidedness” of the object, when from different points of view it is perceived differently, revealing itself in a new perspective at each step; violating the modernist principle of conformity of form and content, the outer and inner shells are formally created independently of each other.
The architects designed the shape of this complex "flexible crystal" in the Grasshoper program, which allows working with complex geometry and calculating surfaces of double curvature. With its help, the PVC fabric was cut and the geometry of the supporting frame was determined.
A large meeting room is not only an outwardly conceptual object, it is also a consolidating space in its meaning. On Fridays, a team gathers there for lectures and communication. Interestingly, according to the formal logic of building office spaces, the office of the head could be located there - you can see everything from above, and the place is central. But there are two managers, and they democratically placed their office on the first floor, closer to the entrance and the rest of the employees.
Numerous areas for work and communication, an area for special projects, a spacious kitchen, a library, a gym with a tennis table - all this is designed to ensure that the bureau team spends a lot of time in the office, especially during the commissioning period. In this interior, the architects fully realized their idea of an ideal workspace - a place where ideas are born and nurtured.
